Survivors recall 750 killed in D-day exercise

Saturday 24 April 2004 13.04 EDT
First published on Saturday 24 April 2004 13.04 EDT

Of all the events being planned over the coming months to commemorate the 60th anniversary of D-day, it is hard to imagine that any will be sadder or more poignant than the one taking place tomorrow in a small church in the seaside village of Stokenham.

Veterans and locals, many now stooped with age, will make their way up the path and through the wooden doors of St Michael and All Angels to commemorate the worst disaster to befall allied troops in the run-up to the invasion of Europe, and until recently one of the second world war's most tragic secrets.

On April 28 1944 a total of 749 US soldiers and sailors died after three ships involved in a training exercise were ambushed by German torpedo boats just off Slapton Sands near Stokenham on the Devon coast.

The full scale of the tragedy remained hidden for almost 50 years because of a secrecy order issued by General Dwight D Eisenhower, the supreme commander of the allied expeditionary force, who feared news of the disaster could destroy morale or tip off the Germans.

In a BBC book and drama documentary produced to coincide with June's D-day commemorations, some of the veterans of the ill-fated Exercise Tiger have been speaking for the first time.

Among them is Eddie McCann, a coxswain on a landing craft sent to pick up survivors, who was just 15 at the time.

While growing up in Washington state he had worked on fishing boats before he ran away from home at the age of 13. Spurred on by what happened at Pearl Harbor in August 1942, he paid a drunk $5 to pose as his father and bluffed his way into the navy. By the time of the Normandy invasion he was a veteran of the landings in north Africa, Sicily and Italy.

Exercise Tiger was one of the biggest full-scale rehearsals before D-day, involving all 23,000 US soldiers who were planning to land on the Normandy beach codenamed Utah. Slapton Sands was chosen because of its similarity to the French beach.

In late 1943 the war cabinet had agreed to the building of an assault training centre on the south Devon coast, and 3,000 civilians in six villages were ordered to leave their homes within a month.

The exercise began at dawn on April 27, with the troops storming the English beach encountering simulated machine gun attacks and fake dead bodies.

That night Mr McCann's flotilla of eight US vessels carrying a second wave of supply troops, medics and engineers, began making its way through Lyme bay.

The convoy was protected by two Royal Navy ships, but due to an error in paperwork the landing vessels - known as LSTs (landing ship, tank) - and their escorts were on different radio frequencies and could not talk to each other. When HMS Scimitar returned to Plymouth after being lightly holed well above the waterline in a collision, the Americans had no way of knowing how vulnerable they were.

Shortly before 2am on April 28, disaster struck when the convoy was discovered by nine German E-boats. One of them fired off two torpedoes which hit the landing ship LST 507. As it started to sink, the 447 soldiers and sailors on board struggled to survive in the cold channel waters.

Fifteen minutes later LST 531 was hit, leaving injured men screaming for help after they were thrown into the burning oil floating on the water.

At 2.30am LST 289 was hit in the stern, but the crew managed to keep it afloat.

The commander responsible for the six surviving ships ordered them back to port, but the skipper of Mr McCann's ship refused to abandon the 1,000 survivors in the freezing waters, and the 15-year-old coxswain was ordered to mount a rescue.

With orders to pick up only the living, he set off into the darkness, moving through a sea of bodies and wreckage.

"There were just so many bodies in the water," he told the Guardian this week from his home in Washington state. "Everything was happening so fast, but it was quite a while before any other boats were put into the water to look for survivors. When I found out we had picked up 45 men I was astounded."

But there was nothing Mr McCann and his crew could do for the other men, a number of whom drowned because they had not been given proper instructions on how to wear their lifejackets. Most were found with their heads in the water and their feet in the air, top heavy from not putting the belts around their chests before inflating the jackets.

When reports of the attack reached the Eisenhower's headquarters an order - never rescinded - was sent out that it should remain secret. Doctors were told to ask no questions as a stream of burnt and injured soldiers arrived at military hospitals, while the men who survived the exercise were held in sealed camps until D-day six weeks later.

Mr McCann's war was not over. On D-day he landed troops in the first wave on the bloodiest of the beachheads. Making countless runs through enemy fire he did not sleep for 48 hours. He later volunteered for special forces operations and joined a unit that was forebear of the US navy seals.

It was more than 40 years before he revealed the horrors of what he saw and experienced on that April night in 1944. He had been told not to talk about the exercise. He did not even not even to his wife until he saw the skipper of his ship being interviewed on television in 1985.

"I just broke down in tears when I saw him, and thought, 'If he can talk about it so can I.' So I told my wife. Now she says I can't seem to stop talking about it."

The couple plan to go to Washington next month for the unveiling of a second world war memorial, but neither will be among the congregation at tomorrow's service.

"Seems like I'm getting pneumonia pretty easy now," he said. Many of those veterans he would like to have seen are dead now, including Angelo Grapenzano, one of the first soldiers his crew pulled out of the water. He died last August.

"I guess there's not so many of us left," he said. "You know, even after all this time it's still pretty hard to talk about."

· D-day by Dan Parry is published by BBC Books, £12.99. D-day, a drama documentary, will be shown on June 6 on BBC1

Tragedies of war suppressed

· The Lancastria

A British troop ship, the Lancastria, was sunk at the mouth of the Loire on June 17 1940. An estimated 5,000 men died, but after Dunkirk it was considered too damaging to release details. "The newspapers have got quite enough disaster for today at least," Churchill said. The Lancastria was the biggest maritime disaster in British history; more people were killed in the sinking than in the Titanic and Lusitania disasters put together

· The Leopoldville

In the early morning of Christmas Eve 1944, a torpedo exploded into the starboard aft hold of this converted liner packed with 2,235 GIs travelling across the channel to join the battle in France. Because of holiday celebrations, help was slow in coming to the ship and nearly 900 men died. Wartime security kept the details of the tragedy buried for 50 years

· The Wilhelm Gustloff

On January 30 1945 this German ship was sunk by a Russian submarine while evacuating German civilians from East Prussia. Built as a merchant ship to take German workers on low-cost cruises, it was crammed with an estimated 8,000 people, nearly all of whom perished. This, the biggest maritime disaster of all time, was kept secret from the German people because of fears about the effect the news could have on morale